Comment 15 for bug 426130

Summary: Wicd solved freeze and frequent wireless disconnects on Acer Aspire 4736z, Atheros AR928X wireless card.

I bought a new Acer Aspire 4736Z laptop with an Atheros AR928X Wireless PCI-e card in it one week ago.

By booting the system with a Gentoo LiveCD and checking the kernel modules I found that the right driver is ath9k module, I connected to wireless networks by engaging the iwconfig command, everything was running smoothly but when I installed Gentoo and booting the system I couldn't stay connected more than 10 min and I had to unload the module by modprobe -r ath9k and reload it again.

I came to this Ubunto bug page and I decided to use Wicd to connect to wireless networks and now the problem is gone ! just wanna say thanks to you guys and also it's good if somebody tell me what's the difference between setting the wireless network up by "iwconfig" command and "wicd" ?

Something that might help is that by setting the network essid by iwconfig command I couldn't get Access point Address but I had the up-time of about 10 minutes but when I connect by wicd the output of iwconfig shows that Access point Address is associated:

iwconfig:
lo no wireless extensions.
sit0 no wireless extensions.
wmaster0 no wireless extensions.
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"Floor 6"
          Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:18:F8:33:60:EF
          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
          Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:on
          Link Quality=23/70 Signal level=-87 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

kernel : 2.6.31-gentoo-r6
lspci : 04:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

The only reason for this post is just to help the open source society and also upgrade my own knowledge.
Thanks a lot.